YugaByte review: Planet-scale Cassandra and Redis During my decades as a database application developer, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would ever have access to a transactional, planet-scale, distributed database, much less that I would be comparing many of them. But with Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Neo4j Enterprise, and […]
What is Julia? A fresh approach to numerical computing Julia is a free open source, high-level, high-performance, dynamic programming language for numerical computing. It has the development convenience of a dynamic language with the performance of a compiled statically typed language, thanks in part to a JIT-compiler based on LLVM that generates native machine code, and […]
Why use Chef for automation and orchestration Chef has been a leading open source tool for automating the provisioning and configuration of servers for the better part of a decade. In recent years the company added InSpec and Habitat to the portfolio, open source projects that automate policy compliance testing and the deployment and configuration […]
Why use SaltStack for automation and orchestration Thomas S. Hatch released Salt, aka the SaltStack Platform, in 2011 after becoming frustrated with the (slow) speed of the Ruby-based open source configuration management systems available at the time, including Puppet and Chef. Hatch used the open source ZeroMQ messaging library for networking and Python as the […]
Why use Puppet for automation and orchestration Puppet the company bills Puppet the automation tool as the de facto standard for automating the delivery and ongoing operation of hybrid infrastructure. That was certainly true at one time: Puppet not only goes back to 2005, but also currently claims 40,000 organizations worldwide as users, including 75 […]
Review: Amazon SageMaker scales deep learning Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning development and deployment service introduced at re:Invent 2017, cleverly sidesteps the eternal debate about the “best” machine learning and deep learning frameworks by supporting all of them at some level. While AWS has publicly supported Apache MXNet, its business is selling you cloud services, […]
Why use Ansible for automation and orchestration If there were an award for “most improved IT orchestration and configuration management tool,” Red Hat’s Ansible would be a top contender. Since its initial development by Michael DeHaan in 2012, it has grown from a simpler way to automate Linux systems than Puppet, to a widely applicable automation […]
Technology of the Year 2018: The best hardware, software, and cloud services Was 2017 the year that every product under the sun was marketed as being cognitive, having machine learning, or being artificially intelligent? Well, yes. But don’t hate all of them. In many cases, machine learning actually did improve the functionality of products, sometimes […]
TensorFlow review: The best deep learning library gets better If you looked at TensorFlow as a deep learning framework last year and decided that it was too hard or too immature to use, it might be time to give it another look. Since I reviewed TensorFlow r0.10 in October 2016, Google’s open source framework for […]
CockroachDB review: A scale-out SQL database built for survival Until very recently, when you shopped for a database you had to choose: Scalability or consistency? SQL databases such as MySQL guarantee strong consistency, but don’t scale well horizontally. (Manual sharding for scalability is no one’s idea of fun.) NoSQL databases such as MongoDB scale beautifully, […]
Recent Comments